As a first generation immigrant who is a nomadic writer, I fantasize about owning land, this way people can “bug off.”

When I think about some people who own land today, it frustrates me. A lot of people own land purely because it was “given” to their ancestry. The history of American land distribution is composed of “land grants.” Today, there are immense financial barriers to homeownership. This solidifies the age-old adage: those who are first, benefit the most.

In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the colonial and federal governments utilized land as a primary tool for state-building. Policies like the Headright system (17^th century; providing 50 acres of land to anyone who paid for their own passage or the passage of another person across the Atlantic) gave away swaths of land between the East Coast and the Mississippi River. This transitioned to the “treasury-based system,” where the government had matured enough to stop giving it away for free. Instead, they realized they could treat the public domain as a massive balance sheet to fund state operations. 

Then came the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of public land to any citizen, or intended citizen, who agreed to live on and improve the tract for five years. This greatly populated land west of the Mississippi.

Each of these programs were explicitly designed to incentivize migration and consolidate power by practically “giving away” territory. From a historical perspective, land was treated as an “infinite” resource to be used to “colonize and populate” the frontier, effectively turning the continent into a permanent fixture of European-style governance and agriculture.

It is important to acknowledge that when that land was “given” to families or pioneers moving West, it was rarely “truly” unoccupied. That distribution was predicated on the systematic displacement, marginalization, and removal of Indigenous populations.

Families who received land grants in the 1700s or 1800s often had a massive head start. They could leverage that property to build intergenerational capital, which compounds over time. Immigrants and others who didn’t inherit that historical head start are forced to “work so hard” just to access a small piece of the same ground that was once distributed for nominal fees or residency requirements.

Back then, the U.S. was “land-rich” but “labor-poor,” meaning the government needed to lure people with free property to settle areas. Today, we exist in a landscape that is “land-scarce” and “capital-intensive,” where land has been fully commodified and locked behind centuries of accumulated wealth, zoning, and private ownership.

It is a sobering look at how the “American Dream” has shifted from an “entitlement” of potential expansion to a modern-day hurdle of market entry. Where you start does matter. In fact, in sometimes makes all the difference between a struggling life and a wonderfully easy one.